


fine young cannibals

by jaekyu



Category: Midsommar (2019)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Hate Sex, Infidelity, Medicinal Drug Use, Pre-Canon, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 21:49:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19981069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: She keeps swallowing poison and expecting it to hurt less; in which Dani tries to be things she is not, until she doesn't.





	fine young cannibals

**Author's Note:**

> how random of me to be writing for a) this fandom and also b) this particular pairing for this fandom. but also how un-random of me to explore the dynamic of a relationship based on a) hate sex and b) infidelity. sure do love those themes!
> 
> i have seen this movie twice and i just keep thinking about it. and before they even get sweden during my first viewing i thought to myself damn, sure would be fun if this mark and dani tension was the result of them sleeping together and christian finding out and now the whole relationship is just strained and they should all just really not be friends anymore but they're gonna try and be anyway. and so now you all have this! cool! enjoy!

Ask yourself  
why you want this.  
Who is it for?  
\-- BECKY BIRTHA

_We depart, we say goodbye_

_Yet each of us remains in the same place._

\-- MARGARET ATWOOD

**1.**

Dani and Mark have never gotten along.

Even before Dani was Christian’s _girlfriend_ , when she was just his friend, drop the prefix, and all they had done was sleep together a few times. Mark didn’t even like her then. The tension between them has always made the air thick, the kind of thick you need a long and sharp knife to properly take a piece out of. Or maybe it’s more pulled tight, a rope about to snap.

Whatever it was, it didn’t really matter. The outcome was the same.

And it wasn’t like Dani didn’t try. Christian always acted like she didn’t try. She tried to be cool, to be fun, to take every jab Mark aimed squarely at her ribs and her ego in stride. Drink beer, smoke weed, watch sports, eat junk food, laugh at things she didn’t find funny. It was never going to work. Maybe that made it worse, her pretending; some people can smell that kind of bullshit like they’re a bloodhound.

“He made up his mind about me before he even met me,” Dani says to Christian. They’re eating chinese takeout on Dani’s couch and having this conversation for the hundredth time. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

_He hates that I take up all your time. He hates that you pay attention to me. It doesn’t matter. Nothing I do will ever make him happy._

Dani hardly ever says the thing she’s thinking out loud.

“He’s been my friend since we were kids,” Christian replies. Dani bites down on her tongue until she tastes blood. “I’m just saying -- I’m just _asking_ you to make an effort.”

“Sorry,” Dani says, quiet. She’s shaking her head and she’s lying right through her teeth and the blood in her mouth. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll keep trying.” She shovels noodles into her blood, hoping to get rid of the taste of copper. It doesn’t work. All she tastes is still just blood.

Dani wonders if Christian ever has these kind of conversations with Mark.

**2.**

The first time Dani met Mark was at a party. She doesn’t remember, or maybe she was never really sure, whose apartment exactly it was. It wasn’t Mark’s, though. He was still wearing his jacket when Dani met him, halfway through a beer. Like he wasn’t sure where to leave his jacket if he was going to take it and didn’t want to ask.

She’s the one who introduces herself. It’s an early indication of the future of their relationship: she’s always been extending the hand and he’s always been refusing.

“Dani,” Mark repeats her name at her. It sounds sour in his mouth. “What’s that short for?”

“Nothing,” Dani replies. “It’s just Dani.” Normally, she’d explain, here, at this moment, with any other person, that her parents are kind of reformed hippies. Reformed hippies who decided _Dani and Terri_ were the most acceptable names for their children. Dani doesn’t even have a middle name. Just those nine letters and that’s all. D-A-N-I A-R-D-O-R.

But she can tell Mark wouldn’t care if she told him any of that. So she crosses her arms and digs crescent moons into the bend of her elbow with her fingernails. Everyone around her is one of Christian’s friends, not hers. Dani feels lonely in a room full of people.

Mark hums at Dani’s response to him. It doesn’t sound like he believes her.

**3.**

Dani’s mom used to parrot all the same things every mother in the nineties did. All the same things feminist rhetorics dismantles once you’re a woman in her mid-twenties. And yet, sometimes, you find yourself recalling these things. Contemplating them, and wondering if there was something you were missing back then that you might still be missing now.

Dani is six years old and her mother says, “boys who are mean to you just don’t know how to tell you that they like you.”

Dani is twenty-something and she thinks to herself, somethings just aren’t that simple -- but other things just aren’t that complicated.

**4.**

Christian throws a party at his apartment.

He invites all his anthropology classmates. Mark and Josh and Pelle. Other people who Dani has never met but Christian insists he’s mentioned. She wants to tell him _no, you haven’t, you never talk to me about any of these people_ , but she doesn’t. There are other faces in the apartment that offer Dani names that she’ll never keep straight in her head. She keeps smiling tight smiles, she keeps nodding, she keeps shaking hands. She feels half-asleep the whole time.

Dani doesn’t invite anyone. She could have invited Lauren. She could have asked to invite Lauren. She knows Christian would have said yes; but the thing is it would have been a yes for her and not for him. A yes to keep her happy, to placate her, that would inconvenience him. It wouldn’t be genuine. Christian’s always giving her those kind of yesses. So she doesn’t ask and he doesn’t offer and now, here she is, alone in a room full of people.

She considers the bottle of Ativan she brought with her. She considers it for a very long time. Then someone else introduces themselves to her.

**5.**

The girl who spills wine down the front of Dani’s grey t-shirt is someone Dani is almost positive Christian has had sex with. Dani isn’t sure if she believes it’s an accident or not.

It’s just after midnight and Dani’s in the bathroom, top off and stuck beneath the running faucet. The water pressure is shit. Dani sniffles and rubs furiously at her wet with her forearm. She can hear people laughing from the other side of the door. They’re not laughing at her but they might as well be. She regrets the hits she took of that joint Josh passed to her.

She’s always just so desperate to be accommodating, to swallow objections like she swallows everything her therapist gives her. She’s so desperate for everyone to _like_ her.

Christian has three lights above his bathroom vanity. One of them flickers, for just a second, and then burns out. Dani is alone and high and topeless in her boyfriends bathroom while a party happens outside. She feels like crying but she won’t let herself do it.

Dani’s shirt is thick and heavy with water in her hands now. She’s pouring hand soap onto it, knowing it won’t help but desperate to try anyway. The most superficial parts of the abstract mess of wine run the water and it’s bubbles red, slicking red against Dani’s hands, but the deepest part of the stain remains. Dani didn’t wear a bra today. The blinds in Christian’s bathroom are shut but the window is open, goosebumps rise on the skin of Dani’s arms. The coolness of the breeze hardens her nipples.

And then the door opens.

It’s Mark. When Dani last saw him he had a beer. He doesn’t have it anymore. Mark is here, in the bathroom, and Dani is naked to her waist with her shirt in Christian’s bathroom sink, water filling it quickly now that’s it’s plugged, and they’re both a little high.

There is a brief moment that feels like a stutter in time, a stop and then a start, where Dani and Mark look at each other and it feels like neither of them even breathe.

The moment passes. Mark’s eyes are heavy on Dani like rain in a thunderstorm. The kind of thick, fat droplets that fall in the summer after a week without any rain and that pelt against windows and almost hurt against bare skin, enveloping from all around. She feels Mark’s gaze with exact precision. Dani watches him watch her panting: the way her breastbone rises and falls heavily, and then she watches him drop his eyes to her bare chest.

There’s another one of those moments, now. The moment where it’s possible no one is even breathing. Like they are stuck between a start and stop, moths under pins. Only this time it’s Dani looking at Mark in the eyes and Mark looking at her bare skin.

The room crackles with electricity. The light above Christian’s sink flickers back on. Dani drops her soaked in the sink, the basin overflowing onto Christian’s counter, and covers herself with crossed arms.

She doesn’t tell Mark to leave.

Sometimes it feels like the words she always thinks but never says are choking her, tying a knot in her vocal chords. Not this time. This time she swallows the words and they settle in her belly just fine.

It ends up being Mark. Mark who speaks first. He says, “sorry,” so quiet Dani almost doesn’t hear it. And then he steps out of the bathroom and shuts the door.

Dani looks at herself in the mirror. She sighs.

The lightbulb goes out again.

**6.**

Once, the five of them -- her, Christian, Josh, Mark, Pelle -- did mushrooms on Christian’s couch on a Sunday afternoon. It was the first time Dani and Christian had ever done them together. Back when doing things together for the first time was still exciting for the two of them.

She remembers curling her knees up to her chest and tucking her feet into Christian’s side. Folding against him like origami. She remembers listening to Pelle’s pencil scratches against a blank page in his sketchbook.

And, she thinks, she’s not sure, but she _thinks_ she remembers Mark watching Christian circle his arm around her until his fingers could play with the loose strands of Dani’s hair. But they were both on psychedelics, so maybe Dani imagined it. Or maybe Mark was watching Dani because he was seeing her face melt off the bone, or shift into every colour of the rainbow.

Dani convinced herself it was easily dismissed. And then, by the time Mark found her in the bathroom, she had forgotten about it.

**7.**

Dani leaves her ruined and soaked shirt to hang over Christian’s shower rod.

She wears the shirt she had brought and meant for the next day instead until 4AM, when the party finally properly wanes and most people go home.

Mark lives across town so he’s spending the night. Josh is already passed out on the couch and no one is moving him.

Christian tries to slide his hand into Dani’s panties when they lay in bed together. She squirms and angles her body away from him.

“Okay,” Christian mumbles. The tone of voice where he’s trying to pretending he’s not annoyed that Dani isn’t fooled by anymore. “Sorry,” he sighs.

Christian sleeps with his back to her. Dani reaches out to slide her ankle between his calves, desperate for some kind of touch. Christian lets her.

(The last time Dani talked to her mother she had asked Dani why, after a year and a half, her and Christian didn’t live together yet. Dani made up a lie about leases she thinks her mother only half-believed.

What her mother doesn’t understand is that it’s better than the real answer: Dani doesn’t know.)

**8.**

She’s not sure how long she sleeps for. It doesn’t feel like long.

Dani feels like she spends longer clutching at the tendrils of sleep at the edges of her mind then actually sleeping. She doesn’t feel groggy, though, after she finally gives up and leaves the warmth of Christian’s bed to use the bathroom.

The sun is already a sliver above the horizon. But it was early morning when they all went to bed anyway. Dani stills flicks on the light in the bathroom. She waits to see if the half-burnt light turns on with the other two. It doesn’t.

Dani does not hear Mark get up. He was in the guest room and Josh was on the couch but somehow Dani hears none of his journey from there to the bathroom. She doesn’t know how he knew she was the one in the bathroom. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he just guessed, maybe he just got lucky.

Maybe things would have been different if Dani had let Christian fuck her. Maybe she would have slept better. Maybe she would have fallen asleep and slept for years.

It doesn’t matter. When Dani opens the door Mark is waiting on the other side of it. He’s wearing his jeans. Dani’s not sure if he went to bed with them or if he put them back on.

Mark takes a step forward and Dani matches it with a step backward. The window in the bathroom is still open and Dani can hear cars driving down the street below it. The corner of her eye catches her shirt still hung on the curtain rod, still soaking wet and still a mess. Mark keeps taking steps forward and Dani keeps taking steps back.

That’s how it works: she’s always giving and he takes when he feels like she deserves it.

When Mark kisses Dani the door has been shut behind him and Dani is almost pressed flat against Christian’s vanity. Mark has a hand against Dani’s ribs through her shirt: fingers fit on the spaces between bones, pressing and pressing. Dani inhales sharply, mouth opening under the press of Mark’s.

She waits for her brain to tell her to say no. It never comes.

Dani would probably just ignore it anyway.

**9.**

Mark goes down on her with no finesse.

Dani’s not going to complain. His mouth is warm and wet and he tries to find the right spots to press and prod with his tongue. It’s not _bad_ , per se, really, it’s just -- not _good_. But Dani threads her hands into his hair and breathes a shuddering exhale and let’s Mark think he’s doing more than he actually is.

It really isn’t that big of a deal to fake it. She does this with Christian too.

Mark’s mouth is glistening when he lifts himself up on the bathroom floor to kiss Dani. Or, it’s less of a kiss and more of a sharp collection of bites against Dani’s mouth. Mark and his mouth had felt so soft between her legs, not hard enough, and here, against her own mouth, he’s much more hard. Almost too hard.

Dani feels dizzy.

When Dani pulls Mark’s cock out of his pants her palm gets wet with precome. She uses it to run smooth the trajectory of her hand down and back up the length of Mark once, then twice. He feel thickers in her hand than Christian does. Mark bites his lip, then bites Dani’s lip, then sink his teeth into the swell of Dani’s breast until she whimpers at him to stop.

He had discarded her top before he even slid his hand between her legs. Her panties are just caught around her knees.

Mark presses Dani against the sink, hitched up slightly higher on his hips, ass digging into the porcelain. His cock slides against the wet warmth between her legs and Dani’s whole body goes taut. Mark slides his index finger into Dani for one _agonizing_ second, slow and not quite methodical, and when he pulls it out he’s replacing it with the stretch of his cock. Dani gasps and grips his shoulders.

Mark fucks up into her, sloppy, no rhythm. The same way he ate her out. His mouth leaves a mess of spit and red marks across Dani’s chest and collarbones.

“Harder,” she tells him. She tugs at his hair, rolls her hips down to meet his, throwing off his shaky rhythm even more. “Fuck me harder.”

Mark huffs. He pushes Dani harder against the counter. She thinks she might bruise. All her blood is rushing through her head and it’s making a roar in her ears. Through it, Dani thinks she might hear Mark growl out, _be quiet_.

Mark presses his hand over Dani’s mouth, sliding two fingers past her lips when he does. He pushes her tongue down like it’s his cock in her mouth, thick and warm. One of the fingers in Dani’s mouth is the same one Mark had inside of her.

She counts to three and breathes in, counts _one, two, three_ and breathes out. Remembers to breathe through her nose less she forget to breathe at all.

Mark comes on her stomach. Dani cups lukewarm water from the sink into her palms and tries to wash it away.

Dani doesn’t let Mark speak first. She knows if he says something he’s going to say something stupid like thanks, or sorry, or some other bullshit. So Dani doesn’t let him say anything.

“I’m leaving,” she says. She picks her shirt up off the floor. The thought of getting back into bed next to Christian after this makes bile creep up Dani’s throat. “If --” she tries to say his name, gives up. “If he asks where I am, tell him I felt sick and went home.”

Mark’s jeans are back up around his waist properly, all properly buttoned-up too. “Sick?”

“Or tell him you were an asshole and I didn’t want to be around you anymore,” Dani supplies through grit teeth. It’s hard to sound as angry as she wants when she’s also trying to be quiet. “Whatever works.”

Then she leaves Mark topless and alone in the bathroom, a bizarre mirror of events that feel like they happened a lifetime ago.

**10.**

Dani gets halfway to her apartment before she has to duck into an alleyway to sob into her own closed fist.

She finds it’s not the guilt itself that makes her do it; but rather, the feeling that she has some kind of obligation to feel it.

**11.**

When Terri first started getting bad, Dani noticed first.

It wasn’t that her parents didn’t care, that they didn’t love them, it’s just that Dani knew her sister as well as she knew herself. So when Terri started to break apart, little pieces of her chipping off like she was being eroded, Dani noticed almost right away.

When they sat Terri down and told her she needed help, she cried. Big, heavy and heaving sobs that shook her and made Dani’s heart clench in her ribcage. When they told Terri she needed to talk to someone, she cried, sobbed, and pointed at Dani and said, “this is your fault.”

It had stung. But not worse than watching Terri hurt the way that she was. So Dani took it in and buried past all the parts of herself she didn’t think about, then a little further.

It was okay. Dani could force herself to get used to being the bad guy.

**12.**

If the first time Mark came to her, the second time Dani goes to him.

He opens the door and lets her into his apartment without words. And by the time he gets that look in his eyes and looseness in his jaw that tells Dani he’s about to speak, the door now shut behind her, she’s sliding both straps off her dress down her shoulders, letting the fabric pool at her feet in a heap.

She’s only wearing panties underneath. Her nipples are already hard. They were hard when she got into the elevator.

Dani thinks about the party at Christian’s place. About the light that was above his sink, about how Mark managed to see all of her, bare and open, in that low light regardless. She thinks about the way he fit his hands against her ribs through the thin fabric of her t-shirt. Thinks about the hardness and softness of his mouth, his hands, and the space between them.

**13.**

She lets Mark come inside her. It’s stupid but she does it anyway. She took an ativan before she came to see him and Dani feels a numbness inside of her spreading outwards. That, honestly, might not have anything to do with her medication at all.

Dani is up and out of Mark’s bed, tugging her panties back over her ass when he says, “do you need some money for Plan B?”

Dani doesn’t answer. Just silently picks her dress up off Mark’s floor and slides it back over her head. Her skin is sticky; there’s no air conditioning in Mark’s studio apartment and the window has been painted shut since before he started renting this place.

_What a gentleman_ , she thinks sarcastically. She ends up saying, “no,” ends up saying, “it’s fine,” instead.

**14.**

When Christian finds out it’s because Mark tells him. In the universes infinite quest to make Dani the bad guy, Mark tells Chrisitian.

“I just,” Christian is sitting on her couch, pressing both heels of his palms into each of his eyes. Dani is not sitting next to him. She stands, across the room, chewing on her fingernails. “I don’t get it - you don’t even, you don’t _like_ each other?”

_Liking someone and fucking someone can be mutually exclusive_ , Dani thinks. Her throat feels tight with the words. She keeps them caught behind the cage of her teeth.

“How many times?” Christian asks.

Dani isn’t sure how much of the truth Mark has offered Christian. Dani decides she’s going to offer all of it, regardless. “Twice,” she replies. Her voice wavers but she’s not crying. She almost wishes she was. “Two times. I’m sorry.”

Christian is silent for a moment. Then he stands, says, “I’m leaving.” Repeats it, “I’m leaving and I don’t want to talk to you for awhile.”

Dani doesn’t try and stop him.

**15.**

Awhile ends up being two and a half weeks.

Two and a half weeks and then Christian calls her and asks if he can come over.

Dani asks him if they can go out, maybe, and get some breakfast? Maybe lunch? Whatever. Can they go anywhere but the walls of her apartment, where familiarity traps her into the reality of the things she’s done? Outside, the truth doesn’t hurt as much, dulled at the sharp edges of it.

Christian says no. Dani relents and says okay.

Christian bares his heart immediately. “I want to forgive you,” he says, once he’s inside her apartment. Dani was right; the real world is too bright in here.

In a rare moment of lucidity from her brain to her mouth, Dani says what she’s thinking. “I don’t know what to say to make this better.” She wants to leave it at that, let those words hang between them. But as soon as Christian takes longer than a second to reply, Dani can’t help herself from speaking. “But I miss you.”

She says it because she means it. She says it because she wants to hear him say he misses her too.

He doesn’t.

“Dani,” Christian sighs. The way he says her name sounds a lot like the way Mark said her name when they first met. “Dani, you have to promise me it won’t happen again. I need to hear you say it.”

“I promise,” Dani replies. “It won’t happen again.”

Christian holds her, then. She feels the warmth of his mouth against her shoulder and then the wet warmth of the tears that must be pushing paths down his face after that. Dani threads her fingers into the hair at the base of Christian’s neck, sighs and holds him in return.

**16.**

In Dani’s defence: when she had made the promise she didn’t know she would end up breaking it.

**17.**

It happens one more time.

In the great rule of threes, it seems, Dani lets it happen one more time. No. Not _lets it_. She’s been trying to remind herself she has more agency than that. Even when that agency is tacked onto shitty things she’s done. So she doesn’t let anything happen. She is the architect of her disaster. Her own judge, jury and executioner. She makes things happen.

She and Mark have sex again. Dani doesn’t _let_ him fuck her -- she fucks Mark and Mark fucks her in return and they are equally culpable. Equally as awful, equal in their betrayal, equal in their uncaring and their ability to hurt.

The guilt, though, isn’t equal. They don’t share the guilt. The guilt is different.

Mark fucks her from behind. He grips her hips and moves fast and doesn’t let up. Fumbles two fingers against Dani’s clit just before he comes, the pressure and friction sending the edge after him not long after.

When it’s over, she wants to ask Mark, _if I let him would you care?_ The thought reminds her of when she told Christian she missed him and then held her breath and waited for him to say the same to her.

She’s still holding her breath now, it seems.

She doesn’t ask Mark the question. Dani lies on her back next to Mark, breathing slowing, and looks at Mark. He is pointedly not looking at her. He is blinking up at his ceiling. Dani knows she’s in his peripheral.

“I should go,” Dani finally speaks.

Mark nods. “Yeah,” he says. He’s still not looking at her. “Yeah, you should go.”

She stops sleeping with Christian after that.

**18.**

The first time she sees Mark after her parents -- after her parents and her _sister_ \-- the first time she sees him _after_ , Mark touches her elbow, just for a second, like he might actually care.

“I’m sorry,” his voice is a hush when he says it to her.

Dani thinks he might mean it for more than just one thing. For more than just the obvious thing.

And it almost, almost, sounds like he means it.

**19.**

The whole world smells like flowers and smoke and flesh.

It hits her when she is cocooned in vines that feel sprouted from her own skin, watching flames lick into the sky: her friends are gone. Dead. She won’t ever see any of them again. Were they ever really even her friends? Was Mark ever really her friend?

Dani thinks she should feel more anguish about that. She remembers when she ducked into that alley after the first time she slept with Mark: more out of obligation than her own feelings. God, she’s always tried to so hard to be things. Tried to be cool, tried to feel guilty, tried to take the weight of everything for everyone. Tried to be in love with Christian, tried to stay in love with Christian.

Bile rises in Dani’s throat. All she can smell is the earth and the fire and the wind and she is smiling.

She throws up into the grass below her and it feels a lot like leaving something behind.

It is horrible and it is beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sure anyone reading this already knows this but the final lines of the fic are also the final lines of the screenplay.


End file.
